The Love of his Life
by Kat-of-the-Streets
Summary: After Cora's illness Robert has to decide whether he wants to be with Cora or Jane and deal with the consequences. Interior monologue. Oneshot. This does not go AU.


AN: This might seem a little confused at times, but that was done on purpose to mirror Robert's feelings at this time.

Let me know what you think!

Kat

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March 1919

He has finally given in to his desire and kissed her. She seemed surprised, but in a good way and he sees this as a good sign, sees this as a sign that it was the right decision. His conscious weighs a little on him the next time he sees his wife, but she is so cold and disinterested that he dismisses any feelings of regret or shame he might feel. The perfunctory kiss his wife places on his cheek when she says goodbye to him to go to another one of her all-important meetings doesn't speak of love, it speaks of habit. A habit she had fallen into because of love, he would never doubt that, but the habit remained after the love had left. He doesn't think that she doesn't love him anymore at all, but he is sure that the way in which she loves him has changed. He is still her husband, he is still the man she sleeps both next to and with, but her love for him feels different now, more like a love she feels out of habit, somehow less emotional, it is not a romantic love anymore. She used to look at him as if she thought that he had discovered electricity, or single handedly built the house they were living in. But she doesn't look at him like that anymore, she looks at him as if he was someone she knew very well, she cared for, she had gotten used to. Nothing less, but nothing more either.

Jane on the other hand looks at him exactly as if she thought that he was some great man who had done great things. Of course, he has never done anything great, his greatest accomplishment so far has been saving the estate, but he did that with rather little effort and skill on his side, he just married a woman with enough money. He isn't proud of it, which means there is nothing he has ever done to be proud of. This feeling first crept upon him when the army rejected him for active service, and it never went away. Cora had tried to take it from him but hadn't been successful, probably because she had done so many things to be proud of, especially in the last two years. Their roles have reversed and they just don't fit anymore. He doesn't need a woman like Cora, he needs a woman like Jane. And so he decides to pursue her.

April 1919

His wife is driving him up the wall. How she can even think about letting their daughter marry the chauffeur is beyond him. She is too American sometimes. There once was a time when he had thought that particular personality trait of hers endearing, but not anymore because this just goes too far. So he leaves her by herself and doesn't ask if she is all right, although he had wanted to because she did look a bit peaky to him. But then again, she is probably just tired, she works too much.

When she leaves the dinner table early, he tells her that he will sleep in his dressing room and he is relieved that he is finally able to justify moving into his own room. It has become harder and harder for him to sleep next to her, because he keeps dreaming of another woman and he is glad to have finally found a reason to sleep in the solitariness of his dressing room, to be able to just let his dreams come true. That is exactly why he leads Jane into his room when she happens to walk along the floor his bedroom is on. He is sure that she came there on purpose, she heard him announcing that he would sleep in his dressing room after all. He wants her with every fiber of his being, but he still sends her away because he is afraid that his wife might die and he can't start sleeping with Jane the night his wife dies. The possibility that he might lose Cora doesn't seem very real to him however, she is a strong woman and has never been seriously ill, but still it would have felt wrong. Or that is what he tells himself.

When he goes into his wife's room the next day and sees her fighting what appears to be a losing battle for her life, there are a few minutes in which he regrets becoming so disinterested, in which he thinks that he still loves her and that her death would surely kill him. He later realizes that while her death would surely have made him very sad, might even have made him depressed for a while, he doesn't love her anymore, not the way he used to, not in a romantic way. But the events of the past two days have also shown him that he has to make a decision. He has to decide which woman he wants to be with, his wife or the maid. Most of his acquaintances would laugh about this and tell him that there wasn't a decision to make, that he should just stick with both of them and not tell Cora about Jane. But he can't do that. They have been married for 29 and a half years now and he loved her for more than 28 of those years, so he can't just go behind her back. If he chooses Jane, he will have to tell Cora. He has no idea what his wife would say, but he supposes she would accept it without much of a fight. He'd offer her a legal separation or divorce if she wanted to, although he is sure that just like him, she would want to keep up appearances. They aren't much more than an appearance nowadays anyway and so he chooses Jane, but when he wants to tell her, she talks about her son and that makes him realize something he had never considered before.

Jane is 20 years younger than Cora and if he were to start an affair with such a young woman, it wouldn't be unlikely that he'd father another child and that is a thought he realizes he can't stomach. Not because it would be a rather ironic twist of fate if he finally did have a son but couldn't make him his heir because he could never acknowledge a bastard child, but because Cora is the mother of his children. Whatever his feelings for her might be now, that is a role that can only ever be hers. So he reverses his decision and sends Jane away. He regrets this decision endlessly, he keeps dreaming of her, but his mind tells him that it was right, even if his heart tells him something else. He doesn't disillusion himself with being in love with Jane, he isn't, he never was, but he had been infuriated with her and she had been in love with him and that had been a very nice feeling. But there is nothing to be done about it.

May 1919

His wife is completely healthy again and tells him that he can move back into her room. He doesn't do it for another week, telling her that she needs to sleep and that he is afraid of waking her and ignoring her claim that she sleeps a lot better with him in their room. But eventually he gives in to her, he knows he has to, and for two nights he doesn't sleep at all for fear of talking about Jane in his sleep. The third night he lets himself be seduced by his wife. He knows it is wrong and he keeps thinking about Jane, he imagines her to be Jane, he has to bite his tongue not to call out Jane's name and he is disgusted by himself, but at least their tryst seems to have satisfied his wife. She falls asleep in his arms and he wants to push her away but he can't, at least not for a little while because she would know that something was off and she isn't supposed to know. He eventually falls asleep himself and he dreams of a dark haired woman with blue eyes and when he wakes up he remembers that the woman in his dream had been far too old to be Jane, and when he feels his wife moving besides him, he realizes that he has dreamed of her.

June 1919

He and Cora fall into a comfortable routine while they are in London for the season, a routine that reminds him of the beginning of their marriage, before he had realized she had fallen in love with him, before he had known that the reason she had accepted his proposal had been that she loved him, not because he offered her title. Before he had known that she had rejected a duke for him.

But now they seem to have come to understanding without talking about it, they don't need to talk about it, because they know each other so well. They stay true to each other; they don't seek out other partners, although he isn't sure whether that thought has ever crossed Cora's mind in the first place, they appear to be the happily married couple they have almost always been to every outsider, including their daughters. They still make love, they are too used to it to stop it, and it still feels good because that is something they already got right weeks before their 'wedding night', which hadn't really been a wedding night because they hadn't cared about the tradition that the wedding night would have to be the first time. They had wanted to make sure that they could do this together before actually getting married. He is a little surprised that it doesn't feel different to him, because although he had always enjoyed that particular part of his marriage rather a lot, his feelings about it had changed when he had realized that he had fallen in love with Cora. Now that he has fallen out of love with her, he would have expected it to feel differently, less intense maybe, but that hasn't happen. That is nothing to complain about however and he accepts it for a fact. Spending his nights with Cora also keeps his dreams about Jane away, in fact he hasn't dreamed of her in weeks and he hardly ever thinks about her during the day. Parliament is still in session and because he is a dutiful peer he attends everything there is to attend. Some, actually most of those meetings are very trying and tiring and he only gets through them because he knows that he will be able to go home again afterwards and that Cora will listen to his complaints and ease the tension his shoulders. As she has done for the past 29 years, she takes care of their social schedule and she has gotten this perfected to a fault. They seem to satisfy everyone's demands, but she by far does not accept every invitation, she makes sure that they have enough evenings at home or with a few close friends or Rosamund for him to not find it all too overbearing. He supposes the fact that no one is offended by them only roughly attending every third ball and every fourth party they are invited to, is due to the unbelievable amount of social calls Cora pays while he is in parliament. She meets everyone who wants to meet them, he knows that and from what his fellow peers tell him, she impresses all their wives with her kindness. He is very thankful to her for taking away so much of the pressure of social life and he has no idea how she does it, because she also keeps working for several charities.

The balls they do attend are so far and few between that he is actually able to enjoy them. He enjoys dancing with her because it is so easy, he never has to worry about finding a topic for conversation, that usually comes to them very easily, and if they have nothing to talk about, they dance in comfortable silence. He dances more dances with her than would be strictly necessary but she loves to dance and it is favor he doesn't mind doing her. Of course, there are what feels like scores of other men who would dance with his wife, and he knows she can't say no to every single one of them, but just as during all the previous seasons, she only dances with other men they both know and she is sure he doesn't hate. Although he hates every man who dances with his wife. Not because he is jealous, but because he is afraid that Cora will eventually fall for one of those men and that their perfect routine, their perfect contentment would be destroyed. Or so he tells himself.

July 1919

The end of the season usually means the return to Downton but not for him, not this year. There are still a few business matters he needs to deal with, so he has to stay in London, quite opposed to Cora who needs to go home, because the end of their social life in London means the beginning of their social life in the country and she can't just ignore it.

Out of some weird form of sentimentality he accompanies her to the train station when she has to leave and when she tells him that she will miss him and he tells her that he will miss her too, he realizes that he has said he truth. He will miss her, she is his closest companion, maybe even his closest friend. That night he has dinner with his sister because he doesn't want to eat alone at home and he gets back to his own house rather late. Without Cora present, there is no pressure for him to go home and he hasn't spent an evening alone with his sister for years probably and they both enjoy it immensely. They talk about their childhood, about things they used to do and things they miss and at the end of the evening Rosamund tells him to come back the next day and he accepts her invitation gladly.

When he gets to his own house, the butler tells him that his wife telephoned to let him know that she had arrived home safely. He thinks this strange but he is also strangely disappointed that he wasn't been home when she telephoned, so he tells the butler to tell Cora to telephone Rosamund, should she try again tomorrow evening. Cora doesn't telephone but he isn't too surprised. He spends another nice evening with his sister but when she asks him to come back again the next day he has to decline because he has already accepted another invitation.

The invitation was issued by a friend who also lives in Yorkshire and he is a little shocked when he sees Jane that night. Apparently she has found another position and been asked to come to London, presumably to help out with the party. About halfway through the night, Jane pulls him into a corner when no one else is looking and kisses him and for a moment he gives in, reveling in the feeling of having her in his arms again. But he breaks the kiss after a few seconds, moves her away from him a little and tells her no. She tells him she wants to be with him, that she'd be there for him if he was lonely and he is visited by a fleeting desire for her, but he can't give in, so he refuses her again. When she asks him why, he tells her that he is afraid of fathering a child and that he couldn't do that to her or a possible child, but what he thinks is that he couldn't do it to Cora. That night he has very vivid dreams about a dark-haired woman with blue eyes again, but this time he doesn't have to look for clues to find out who the woman staring in his dreams had been, he knows who it was and it was Cora, there is no doubt about it.

He decides to spend his last night in London with his sister. When Rosamund asks him if he was looking forward to going home he replies that he misses Downton. His sister comments that she thinks that he is obviously missing someone at Downton more than the estate itself and he says that he misses everyone there. His sister shakes her head at him and tells him that he probably has no idea how lucky he is. He only then realizes that she was talking about Cora and he considers telling Rosamund that he doesn't love his wife anymore, that too many things have happened, but he decides against it because saying it out loud would make it real.

When he comes home the next day, he is a little disappointed that no one waits in front of the house for him, until her remembers that he forgot to tell someone that he would be home. The first two members of his family that he sees are his daughters Mary and Edith and after having greeted him they tell him that their mother is talking a walk. So he goes outside again because he has been looking forward to walking around his estate for weeks now. He walks along one of the paths that he and Cora usually take when they go for a walk either early in the morning or late at night and when he sees her ahead of him, he speeds up, determined to catch up with her. He tells himself he does this because it would be unfair to follow her without letting her know. Eventually she hears his footsteps, turns around, stops for a second and then almost runs towards him. "Robert," she says when she flings her arms around him and kisses him on the lips. The moment he hears her speak his name in her unique accent a cold shiver runs through him, one that has nothing to do with his wife's voice or her arms around him or his arms around her. Or so he tells himself. And anyway, he only put his arms around her to stop her from falling over.

August 1919

He and Cora fall back into what he calls their 'Downton routine' within less than a day and while it doesn't make him happy in the way he used to be happy with her, it makes him content and he knows that that is much, much more than most of his acquaintances have.

One afternoon while he is in the library with her, he looks up from his book and sees that she is staring at him with an expression on her face that scares his wits out of him. When he asks her why she keeps staring at him she replies "I love you. I think I haven't told you in quite some time. But I do." He begins to stutter and blubber but she only says "You don't have to say it back. I've known you for thirty years and I know that there are times at which you can't talk about your feelings, not even to me. And the war has taken its toll on both of us, but you more so than me I think. So don't worry, don't say it before you feel comfortable speaking about your feelings again. Because I know that you love me too." With that she returns her attention to her own book. He feels as if he has been punched in the stomach. He had been sure that he and Cora were on the same page, that they didn't love each other anymore, at least not in the romantic way they used to, but that they had found a way around that, that they had both accepted that as fact and both decided to keep on living their lives regardless. And now he realizes that his wife thinks differently about their marriage, that she still believes them to be in love, that she has no idea that his feelings for her have changed. The thought makes him sick and he excuses himself, goes to his own room, walks right through to his bathroom and begins to vomit. It takes him a rather long time to collect himself and he has to lie down on his bed. He pretends to be asleep when Cora comes into his room, looking for him and it costs him all he has got not to flinch at the kiss she places on his cheek before she leaves again.

He doesn't go down for dinner that night because he needs to be alone, he needs to think about what Cora said and what it means for him, what it means for them. Apparently she isn't indifferent to him, she still seems to love him with all her heart and hasn't realized that he doesn't love her anymore. He wonders whether he really is such a good actor or whether she just doesn't want to see the truth and then concludes that it must be the second option. He has no idea what to do because they are living a lie and he wonders if he can really do that to Cora, if he shouldn't tell her the truth, if that wouldn't be fairer. But she would be hurt very much by that and he can't do that to her either, so he decides to keep quiet and keep on playing the loving husband, regardless of how difficult it is for him. He knows that Cora doesn't deserve any of this, but he also doesn't know what else to do.

September 1919

He has played the dutiful, loving husband for three weeks now and it gets harder every day. It feels so wrong to him to lie to Cora about something so substantial; he has never lied to her before, not like that. But if he tells her, he is sure to break her heart and he can't bear to think of seeing his wife with a broken heart. She would fall apart, he knows this, she would be disappointed and hurt and she would have every right to be, because it would have been him, the one person she loves above all, who would have brought her all that pain. He tells himself that he can wait another one or two weeks to talk to her, that he can have another one or two weeks to think about how to tell her that he doesn't love her anymore, not in a romantic way. Because he still loves her in a non-romantic way, he is sure of it. If he didn't, he wouldn't be so concerned about hurting her. But it is not the kind of love she bears for him, not the kind of love she needs or deserves, not the kind of love that she would think he was referring to if he said 'I love you' to her again. He knows that she is waiting for him to tell her that he loves her, her patience with him is slowly but surely coming to an end. Maybe she will realize what is going on and maybe that would be the best solution. Maybe he should let her find out by herself. But if he does that, then there will come day, there will come a point at which she will ask him if he loves her and he will have to answer no, because if he said yes he would willfully let her misunderstand him. And the longer he keeps this up, the more she will be hurt. So he makes up his mind to tell her. Tonight, after dinner, when they are alone in their bedroom. He supposes it will be his last night in that room, or rather his last evening because he doubts that Cora will ever let him sleep in there again. That thought brings tears to his eyes, it is a thought he can hardly bear, not spending his nights and parts of the days with Cora is something he can't fathom, but he will have to deal with it, no matter how hard it might be for him, no matter how much he treasures her uncanny talent to always make lunch a light and pleasurable affair, regardless of how stressful his day is, no matter how happy it makes him that after thirty years of marriage she still smiles at him every time he enters a room she is in, no matter how much he will miss walking back into their bedroom every morning to bring her her letters and watch her read them and hear her comments on them, no matter how much he will miss making love to her, no matter how much he will miss their pillow talks, talks that are sometimes about trifles and make him laugh and that are sometimes so deep that he can hardly believe that he is able to be so open to anyone, no matter how much he likes to look at her across the dining room table and be reassured that Downton will stand because she is it's countess, is his countess. His Countess. He stops breathing for a moment and his chest begins to constrict and then he walks into the entrance hall without really grasping what he is doing and the first person he sees is Edith and when he asks her where her mother is, she tells him that she is on the back porch, reading. 'The back porch' is a term coined by Cora for a terrace at the other side of the house, a place where she likes to sit and read, especially in summer. She once told him that she used to spend hours every day on her parents' back porch when she was younger. He opens the door and goes outside and she sits there, occupying two chairs, sitting in one, her feet placed on the other. She is wrapped in blanket because even after having lived in England for more than thirty years, English Septembers are still too cold for her. The book she reads is placed on her legs and she is biting the nail on her left thumb. She always does this when she is reading and lost in what she reads, she has passed this habit on to all of their daughters. She now laughs out loud and lifts her head and then sees him standing there. She smiles at him and his chest constricts even more and he stares at her and knows he has to say something so he asks her what she is reading and she tells him that it is A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. He vaguely remembers having read the book about twenty years ago, fittingly on one of their trips to America, so to make conversation, to buy himself more time to understand the oppressing feeling in his chest, he asks what is so funny about it and she looks at him with a dreamy smile and says "the comments you scribbled in the margins twenty years ago." So she has still got that book. He looks at her and watches the lose strands of her hair fly in the wind, watches how she unconsciously tucks one of them behind her left ear and sees her wedding ring glitter in the sun. He touches his own wedding ring, the ring she placed on his finger during their wedding ceremony almost thirty years ago and then his mind realizes what his heart is literally shouting at him. He has fallen in love for the second time in his life. For the second time in his life he has fallen in love with his wife. And when he realizes that, he walks to her, and kneels down next to her chair, taking no note of the puddle that is still there from that morning's rain. He takes his hands in hers and looks at her and says "I love you. With all my heart." She smiles a brilliant smile at him and then leans down to kiss him and the kiss is so sweet and tender and loving that it lets tears run down his cheeks. When they break apart she says "I love you too and you are kneeling in a puddle of mud." This makes him smile through his tears and he gets up and then takes the book of her legs and takes her hands in a motion that indicates for her to get up as well. She does what he wordlessly asks of her and when she is on her feet he pulls her close to him and looks into her eyes and says "I love you, I love you, I love you." She wraps her arms around him and puts her head on his shoulder and he can feel sobs wracking through her body. He wonders if she knows how much he struggled with their marriage, how close he came to ending it, if not on paper then in his heart. He wonders if she knows that he has fallen in love with her a second time and the moment that thought enters his minds he knows it is not true. He fell in love with her only once, more than 29 years ago and he never stopped loving her. He just stopped reading the signs right. Her kisses were never perfunctory and out of habit and his rebellion against feeling neglected had been an act of utter stupidity, a way for him to deal with his inability to tell his wife that he wanted more of her time. There are tears running down his face again now and he holds on even tighter to his wife, his Countess, the love of his life.


End file.
